


Quis Terreat Ipsa Terrores?

by NevillesGran



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, no one but georgie is there for more than one scene, the Georgie Barker Yells At Every Entity fic we DESERVE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 11:53:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20209306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: What doesn't kill you makes you the only true wild card in a world dominated by entities that manifest and feed on fear. Or: Georgie puts her foot down.





	Quis Terreat Ipsa Terrores?

**Author's Note:**

> I don't think Georgie is under any moral or personal obligation whatsoever to make any further effort to save these idiots instead of looking out for her own mental/emotional health and physical safety. That said...

Georgie Barker did not go to war.

She couldn’t win a war; she knew that.

But she made a decision in the same way she usually did—at least, the way she did on her better days. She weighed her options, did a little preparatory research, considered how fear would affect her choices if she could feel it, and then took a stand.

She started with the Lukases, because she’d heard that name from both Jon and Melanie and they had actual companies, with phone numbers in official business directories.

The shipping and holding company had a voicemail. The charity foundation didn’t even have that. The investment firm had a phone tree that led her on for three hours of alternating distant hold music and recorded instructions so devoid of feeling that it made her start to wonder if there were any humans left in the world, anywhere, who would take her call.

That was about what she should have expected, in retrospect, from what Melanie said. She left a voicemail with the shipping company.

…

Some digging around in databases of non-profit organizations turned up the Fairchild Foundation as the second-most long-standing supporter of the Magnus Institute. She had no other leads on them, but over a decade of academic research, creating a podcast about ghost stories, and trauma-induced lack of fear had completely inured Georgie to the awkwardness of cold-call weird emails.

_ To Whom It May Concern, _ she began, to their general info@ address.

_ My name is Georgina Barker. I’m a friend of Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute. I have reason to believe that one or more of your upper management is an avatar of some sort of fundamental human or animal fear. If so, please respond ASAP. If that sounds absurd, feel free to pass this around the office as a joke! _

_ You can also contact me by phone at… _

She picked up her cell a couple days later, when the same unknown number called twice in a row (spam was terrible, these days.) “Georgie Barker speaking.”

“Amanda Fairchild.” The woman’s voice held the clipped cold of a business executive and the amused cruelty of a Jane Austen antagonist. “Is the Archivist being coy, or are you a new Assistant being flung to the wolves—or the sky, as may be?”

“I’m Jon’s friend, not his ‘assistant.’” Georgie matched cold for cold. “I just wanted to tell you to back off.”

“You what.” Even her flat disbelief sounded like that of an elegant cat.

“I could say it less politely,” Georgie offered. “Either way, I mean it. You and all your…terror faction. Back off.”

Amanda laughed, and it wasn’t just cold and cruel—it was slivers of ice cracking off the edge of a glacier and making no dent in its ancient vastness. It was crushing depths of the ocean, the heartless void of space. “Little girl, you have _ no _ idea—”

“I comprehended the end of eternity when I was eighteen,” Georgie said flatly. “You don’t scare me.”

…

You didn’t spend three-plus years as a London-based ghost podcaster without hearing about the late-night trains. Georgie had even done an episode about them last year, pulling together some of the best stories into something almost substantial—or at least, spooky enough to be fun.

But there were other stories, for which “spooky” was too light a word. About what could be glimpsed when sometimes there was a collision, or that time with the collapse at the 12th St stop.

Georgie didn’t actually notice, at first, which was embarrassing. She’d been out late with some mates, gotten a bit tipsy, and only realized she should have hit her stop already when there was far too long a gap between one and the next. She looked out the window and somehow it was illuminated enough to see the dirt—not stone tunnel but crumbling dirt—pressing down on the train as it trundled on.

She opened the list she’d made on her phone and checked one off as she stood. Then, to the bewilderment of the old man who was the sole other passenger in the car, she started yelling at the surrounding earth.

They got off at Georgie’s stop ten minutes later.

…

“It wasn’t a very good rib, though,” the monster rumbled, in a way that made clear that not only did it have three extra arms, a head and a half, and nearly nine feet of height, but its mouth, voice box, and probably lungs were all in entirely incorrect places.

It was possible, Georgie thought grimly as she backed against the gym wall, that she had made a mistake with this one.

She thought it much harder when the thing smacked the mace can from her hand and grinned with three sets of teeth. 

“Don’t need to be scared to have nice bones.”

A door opened at her side, where there had definitely been blank wall a moment ago. A woman in a pantsuit made of angles leaned out with a matching, twisting grin. “Oh, but I think the question is, are _ you _ scared of _ me_?”

“No,” the monster growled. But it took a step backwards.

The woman in the door smiled even more widely. It dimpled in fractals. “That’s nice. I _ like _ our arrangement. You leave my tunnels and the Institute alone, and I don’t see if I can’t digest you _ this _ time. This one, too, I think, for leaving-alone.”

Without another word, she grabbed Georgie by the wrist and yanked her through the door, letting go as it slammed shut behind them. The twisting hallway extended where it had been.

“Ah- Helen, right?” Georgie offered a handshake, breathing through her adrenaline-racing heart. Physical reactions to danger still happened, even as her head remained clear. “Melanie’s mentioned you. Thanks for the save, there.”

“I _ am _ Helen!” She tilted her head like an owl. “You should be more careful, though. I like what you’re doing—you have my assent, by the way, for a time—but the Eye is a very passive protector, and the End even more so. You are very lucky I was in the neighborhood.”

“I—the Eye? I haven’t even told Melanie—”

Helen laughed softly, echoing off the mirrors, and tapped Georgie’s purse. For the first time, Georgie noticed the soft sound of static. She reached in and immediately found a running tape recorder, where her mace had been.

“What the hell.”

…

Helen was very good at finding people, and that was how Georgie ended up sitting in a café in Bristol with a woman made of molten wax. Jude Perry sprawled across her chair, comfortable as a tiger in the sweltering summer heat.

“I _ could _ still set you on fire, though. Sounds like it might even hurt the Archivist, which would be…delicious.”

She had a tiger’s lazy smile, too. The seats of their chairs were woven wicker; smoke drifted up from hers.

Georgie leaned forward, over the tape recorder she had found in her bag when she sat down and pointedly turned off.

“What if I could offer you the possibility of something better?”

…

Another evening, something stalked her home. It stayed just close enough to be seen when she turned her head, in the shadows until she whipped around and caught it at just the right moment in a streetlight. It looked like a policewoman, but its teeth were much too sharp and it looked like it had claws.

Georgie tucked her hand into her purse, and the new can of mace she kept there. “Do you want something?”

It prowled closer. “Word on the street is you’re trying to help the Archivist and his pack escape what’s coming to them.”

“And if I am?” 

“Nothing can run forever.” It bared its fangs. “Hunt gets them all, in the end.”

She raised her chin and met its eyes, as though she was intimidating the Admiral into getting off her bed. “I know _ that_. I’m just looking to buy a little time.”

…

Another thing you heard in your first days as any sort of paranormal investigator in London was the legend of Grifter’s Bone. Hearing about them was easy. Hearing _ them _ took more effort, and a lot of luck. It took her nearly a month to find a time and place posted on a Reddit thread that she promptly scrubbed from her browser history on sheer principle.

Hearing them without _ hearing _ them…well, Georgie needed a new pair of noise-cancelling headphones anyway.

She still heard the music. It wasn’t that bad, actually—something like ska with a flute leading; surprisingly catchy with the flutist’s trill and the guitarist’s riff and the drummer’s blood-pounding beat. The first listener to move was a skinhead in the second row, who took a pen out of her purse and stabbed it through her date’s eye. That was the cue for the rest of the audience to erupt into terrible, bloody dance.

Fear was barely a memory but Georgie could still feel horror at the loss of life as she edged around the bloodbath, her back to the wall. More than that, she could feel _ rage _ . Rage at the injustice, the death of these random innocents. Rage at herself for being so stupid to come; rage at Jon for dragging her into this, at Melanie for not getting out faster, at all the people they worked with that she barely fucking knew, for not helping. For getting themselves stuck. Rage at the _ fucking _ tape recorder that had appeared in her pocket again, and rage, rage, _ blinding _ rage, with the music in her ears and the scent of blood omnipresent, at the monsters that _ did _ this, to her and to her friends and to every single _ goddamn _ person on the planet. Why did they have to keep _ fighting_. Why couldn’t they all just have a goddamned _ break_.

She slipped onstage—blood-splattered but otherwise untouched by the fight below—as the song ended in a crescendo of battle-lust. The horns of ancient war gods, the drummer’s crashing march, the piercing whistle of Alfred Grifter’s flute.

Georgie spun him by the shoulder and punched him in the face.

…

She took a couple days off, after that. Her dreams had too much blood. Still nothing in them ever made her wake up trembling, but it wasn’t pleasant.

Then she found herself catching the eye of a blond woman across a coffee shop, ordering two drinks when she’d certainly only gone in for one, and walking over to sit at her table. Closer, Georgie could see how the hair was dyed so pale to make a patch of cobweb binding the woman’s forehead together less noticeable.

“Do spiders really get an entire variety of terror?” she asked, sliding the second coffee over. “I didn’t realize arachnophobia was so rampant.”

The woman smiled. “The Mother of Puppets also represents the fear of being manipulated. Have you ever read Tolstoy?”

“Are we rehashing a Philosophy of Self seminar?” Georgie sipped her drink. A little too much milk. “Because I’m game, but I’m warning you, you aren’t going to get a rise out of me.”

“I quite understand,” the spider woman assured her. “I’m here to help, actually.” Something about her smile suggested mandibles. “It quite serves my purposes for the Archivist and his staff to be away from London for a while, presently.”

Georgie eyed her carefully. “That does make me doubt my choices, but I’m very sure you’re just saying whatever you think will make that happen, and, again, it’s not going to work. At least, it’s not going to feed you.”

The spider woman laughed. It was surprisingly deep-throated for such a slight woman. 

“You are a fun one! Sorry, sorry, old habits die hard.” She put one hand up on the table, and this time, her smile looked almost entirely human. “I’m Annabelle, by the way. And I really am offering you help. I imagine you’re working through some sort of list?”

Reluctantly, but fairly sure it was of her own accord (and not sure how to stop it anyway), Georgie pulled up the notes on her phone and passed it over. 

“I don’t know what to do about the Unknowing people,” she admitted. “Where to find them or anything. Do they want any sort of revenge?”

Annabelle clicked her tongue entirely like pincers as she scrolled through Georgie’s phone. “Desperately. But there isn’t enough left of them to do anything about it for another five years or so. Same enough for the Corruption, though I might have to pull a few strings to keep Amherst distracted—pun intended. Nor do you need to worry about the Dark—”

“I knew there had to be a fear of the dark,” said Georgie, and took a self-satisfied drink. 

…

The Lonely caught up with her eventually. She was walking home from the corner store with a few cans of cat food and a box of ice cream sandwiches when the fog thickened and she realized there was no one else on the street. None of this was particularly odd for London at 10pm, in her relatively quiet neighborhood, but the sudden unholy _ shriek _ of static from her bag definitely was. (There has not, of course, been a tape recorder there a moment ago.)

“What is it with followers of Beholding?” the man abruptly walking beside her complained. “‘Stop disappearing the researchers.’ ‘No touching that random friend of the Archivist’s, either.’ You’d think they worship a god of clinginess, rather than eternal watching.”

He stopped half a step in front of her and held out one hand. “Peter Lukas. You must be Georgie Barker. I think you left me a voicemail?”

He was tall, broad-shouldered, and had entirely too affable a smile for this empty world.

“So you’re not going to threaten to disappear me, too, then?” said Georgie, and didn’t take his hand.

“Should I?” 

She gestured with her grocery bag, tape recorder still screaming. “I’d rather not. I have a cat to get home and feed.”

Lukas gave a considering hum and where there was once empty streets, now there was only empty, chilling fog. It seeped into her bones with the essence of _ loneliness_—there was nothing left in the world and moreover there never had been; her mother never liked her and half her friends were lost already; nobody cared and nobody was coming and she was absolutely, utterly lost.

“Oh no, a new variant of depression,” Georgie deadpanned. She shouldered her bag (even the static had faded to nothing) and started walking forward.

The world came rushing back, buildings and cars and even lights, warmth, a couple people walking on the opposite side of the street. They still paid no attention to Georgie and the monster who now had to take a couple long strides to catch up with her, but they were there.

“I suppose I can afford to lose the Archival staff for a long weekend,” Lukas said. “There are forms for this sort of thing, right—vacation leave?”

“Two weeks,” said Georgie, crossing her arms.

“One week.”

“One week, and Martin’s going, too.”

“Oh no, I simply can’t manage without my assistant.” His tone was still jovial but the fog started to thicken around them again, reflected in his pale, cold eyes.

“I don’t really know how this works,” Georgie said thoughtfully. “When I walk out of here, will it hurt you?” She jangled her groceries, tape recorder and all. “Because I really do have a cat to get back to. He’ll start annoying the neighbors if no one feeds him soon.”

…

The End was the easiest to reach by far. She just waited for another nightmare-that-wasn’t, and took a break from watching Jon watch her to give her fiercest glare to the dead woman instead.

“I know you’re here. I don’t mind. But everyone else does, and I’m not having that.”

...

Somehow, Georgie was not remotely surprised when she phoned the prison and was informed that Elias Bouchard had been expecting her to get in touch, and would she like to come by on Tuesday afternoon, if convenient?

“Miss Barker.” He stood as she entered the visiting room, in an orange jumpsuit and jangling handcuffs that sheer attitude turned to a business suit and cufflinks. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet—”

“Cut the crap,” said Georgie. “Jon and everyone are going on vacation for a week, to get away from...all this.” She gestured at him, at whatever supernatural entity lay behind his eyes, at all the rest of them. “No attacks, no terror, no creepy watching.”

“And, no offense, but how exactly do you intend to stop me from keeping an eye on my Archivist?” He sounded politely curious, but his sliver of a smile dripped condescension. 

She returned it as sweetly as she knew how. “I told Jude Perry she could burn down the Magnus Institute if I caught even the faintest hint of it. I got the impression she might do it anyway, once I tell her what dates it’ll be mostly unprotected. Maybe you should keep an eye on that, instead?”

Georgie hadn’t felt fear in eleven years, but she knew what it looked like when it flashed, just for a moment, in someone’s eyes.

Unfortunately, Bouchard rallied.

“That might genuinely kill Jon, at this point.” His gaze raked her soul and pulled up everything she had ever been ashamed of. “Are you willing to risk that?”

“I don’t know.” Georgie stared right back. “Are you?”

…

Georgie twisted the handle on stair door down to the Archives then kicked it open the rest of the way, because in one hand she held a bag of assorted cassette tapes and a folder of printed-out plane tickets and a condo reservation, and with the other she was towing a very confused Martin Blackwood, who apparently had been told nothing before she barged into his office thirty minutes ago.

Basira—they’d met, once—reacted a lot faster than Martin had. The cup of tea in her hand held steady as her other hand leapt to where Georgie was sure a gun had once sat at her hip, before she recognized them. 

“Ah- Georgie, right?” She blinked in surprise. “Martin?”

Martin gave a sheepish wave, as Georgie tugged him the rest of the way down the stairs.

“Here, I bought you all week off. Literally; Martin got the Institute to reimburse me.” She pushed the folder into Basira’s hands. “Really a week off, for all of you. Five round-trip tickets to Majorca, plus a condo, and no one is going to be stalking you, or trapping you in creepy fog dimensions, or whatever else has been going on around here. Flight’s in three hours. Have fun.”

The door at the end of the hallway slammed as Jon all but ran out. “Martin! ...Georgie? What are you-”

She tossed the bag of tapes at him. He fumbled, lunged, and caught it just before it hit the floor.

“Snack for the plane,” she said. “I destroyed the Grifter’s Bone one—I think it might drive you mad. Literally.” 

While he was off-balance, she frowned at him. ”I’ve been informed that you’re giving more people nightmares, now. You will not do that while you’re on vacation. ‘No creepy stuff’ applies to you, too.”

Jon looked away.

“Georgie, what did you _ do? _” Melanie had appeared by now, and was looking from the tickets to her with naked concern.

It was a relief to see on Melanie’s face, really; she’d been nothing but angry or carefully still for so long.

“I got you all a week off,” Georgie repeated. “I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t want to. And I can’t help—you have to figure it out your own damn selves, including probably all of you getting some serious therapy—Melanie, you’re doing great, but Jon, you’re _ clearly _ not, and I bet the rest of you aren’t doing great, either. But nothing good is happening _ here _, and I’m sick of it. So…” She spread her hands—pulling Martin forward a little, to avoid looking at Jon at closer range. “Consider this my last time reaching out, to anyone who doesn’t start at least trying. You have a week. Catch up on some sleep and me time, then at least decide whether or not to figure your shit out.”

The silence and lack of eye contact that greeted her speech was broken by Daisy, half a step behind Basira, quietly saying, “I’m not sure you’re as free as all that. Found this stuck to my desk about half an hour ago, was wondering what it was about.”

She held out a piece of paper with cobwebs stuck to the edges: a roundtrip plane ticket to Majorca for one Georgina Barker, printed out with a note scribbled on the bottom that read, “The resort takes pets, if you can’t get a cat-sitter in time!” It was signed with a smiley face with eight eyes.

Georgie closed her eyes and wondered if she could retroactively un-pay for a coffee. “See, this is why we all need a break.”

…

And, reader, they had a GREAT beach episode vacation and NO monsters attacked, not even the Archivist. Though the Distortion did add her door to the condo on the second day, and proceeded to beat everyone at beach volleyball. 

**Author's Note:**

> Which was your favorite encounter? Comment below! Concrit welcome ::::)


End file.
